By the Rev. A. C. Smith. 



319 



Beans of an intricate system of drainage, I can well understand that 

 ■he presence of a single mole would be most undesirable, and I can. 

 appreciate the motive which prompts to an immediate hunt, only 

 fending in his capture, whenever a wretched individual of this genus 

 chances to wander into those tabooed regions: but in all other places 

 where the drains are neither so numerous, nor so complicated, I 

 unhesitatingly assert that the benefits which this little animal confers 

 on man infinitely counterbalance the trifling injury of which he 

 may occasionally be guilty, and that even in the lightest soil ; 

 whereas in stiff soils, such as are to be found generally throughout 

 our districts in North Wilts, the more they loosen the earth and 

 drain it with their subterranean galleries, the lighter and the more 

 productive it will become : while even the unsightly hillocks may he 

 very quickly and easily spread abroad on the land, and no top-dressing 

 can be found at once so valuable and so cheaply procured, as the fine 

 earth of which these hillocks are composed. 



In short, I trust that the day is not far distant when the mole- 

 catcher or want-catcher — as we call him in Wiltshire — with his 

 home-made wooden traps, his deliberate movements, his stealthy 

 tread, and his oracular speech, will be a thing of the past; when 

 the most conspicuous bush at the crossing of two rides in our woods, 

 or near the field gate, shall not be adorned with bunches of this 

 slaughtered innocent ; but when all will alike combine to preserve 

 this, which is at once the most harmless, the most useful, and I may 

 truly add, the most persecuted of all our British quadrupeds. 



VOL. XV. NO. XLV. 



